Gun lobby thugs keep smart weapons off the market: Editorial

When one car manufacturer comes up with a potential advance in safety technology and proposes it for the market, does the Big Auto lobby shoot it down as bad for business?

If a toymaker says it wants to sell a gizmo that’s far safer for children, do its peers object, saying that if this safer thing goes on sale, pretty soon all manufacturers everywhere will be forced to make their toys safer?

Of course not. But this kind of harassment and faulty logic on the part of the gun lobby is precisely what has quashed the hopes this spring of a manufacturer who is proposing to bring a so-called smart gun to the U.S. market.

Armatix, a German manufacturer, has developed a pistol that can’t be fired unless its authorized user is wearing a watch with a radio control that enables the gun after a five-digit PIN code is entered.

Given the massacres with which we have grown terrifyingly familiar, given the real concerns responsible gun owners have about children and others finding and shooting a gun, given the 11,000 non-suicide U.S. homicides in a year that involve guns, there would seem to be a legitimate market for such a technological advance.

But when a local representative reached a deal to make the smart gun available for sale at the Oak Tree Gun Club up in Newhall, the Big Gun extremists came out loaded for bear. The company representative began to receive death threats. “I have no qualms with the idea of personally and professionally leveling the life of someone who has attempted to profit from disarming me and my fellow Americans,” one commenter posted on calguns.net. After the Oak Tree owner spoke positively about how such a safety advance could “revolutionize the gun industry” in a Washington Post article, his shooting range and store was threatened with a massive boycott. The gun lobby suggested that there was a worldwide conspiracy afoot because, shudder, the company’s representative had once testified before a United Nations panel.

All of a sudden, without explanation to the Armatix representative, the deal was off, and all signs of any involvement with Oak Tree were gone.

Because that is how the gun lobby works: In the classic manner of the schoolyard bully, only one armed to the teeth.

There are so many problems that access to smart guns would address. Murder and suicide rates could well go down. Crooks who grab away a police officer’s sidearm couldn’t use it. Stolen weapons would be useless to the thief.

It is true that lawmakers in one of the 50 states, New Jersey, passed legislation a decade ago, after one or another of the American massacres, stating that once smart guns became available in this country, all guns sold in the state would have to be smart. It’s highly unlikely the law would hold up to Second Amendment scrutiny by the courts.

Advertisement

But that doesn’t matter to the extremists at the top of the gun lobby and the scum at the bottom who do their dirty work with death threats. It doesn’t matter if many Americans who want a safer gun would like to be able to buy one. We can’t, and if we try to, we might sleep with the fishes.